The explosion of social analytics

The 20 partners in Friday's announcement offer deep analytic capabilities that Saleforce.com doesn't offer. Clarabridge, for example, offers multi-lingual sentiment-analysis. Klout scores the influence of those commenting on social networks. Lithium specializes in natural language processing for a more accurate understanding of comments. And OpenAmplify specializes in identifying and classifying brand and product mentions for customer service purposes.

A handful of these partner capabilities were already accessible as add-on packs through Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud Dashboard. The dashboard lets companies plug these partner tools into social measurement workflows with "just a few clicks." With Friday's announcement, Salesforce has greatly expanded the list of third-party options. The other vendors on the list are Bitext, Calais, Caterva, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Kred, LeadSift, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company, and Trendspottr.